Clifton Harness didn’t set out to revolutionize architecture. He just wanted to stop counting parking stalls. “The counting of parking spaces absolutely should be automated—let’s not waste our lives counting parking stalls,” he said. As a young professional working on spec projects, Harness found himself repeatedly laying out parking lots by hand, which is a tedious, error-prone task that often dictated whether a project was even feasible. Getting them wrong or spending too long getting them right can derail entire deals.
That realization led Harness to co-found TestFit, a generative design software that automates feasibility studies for real estate projects. The platform enables architects, developers, and contractors to test unit mixes, parking requirements, and site configurations in seconds. “You need to solve a business problem that is valuable for a large number of people,” Harness said.
Built from scratch, TestFit prioritizes real-time performance and usability. Since its 2017 launch, the software has been adopted by around 100 firms in 35 states and six countries. “But TestFit is not ever going to produce an ‘optimal’ solution,” he said. “It’s like ‘optimal’ to who? Optimal to the developer, the city, the tax base, to carbon? We’re trying to satisfy all constraints and present a solution that is as close as possible to what the user has requested, given the parameters.”
TestFit focuses on helping users make faster, better-informed decisions. Instead of presenting a trillion options, it aims to give users the ability to tinker and find what works best for them.
Now backed by Parkway Venture Capital, Harness is scaling the company’s reach into office, retail, and more complex typologies. As a leader, he’s pragmatic and self-aware, focused less on disruption and more on building software that respects the complexity of architecture.
